Bethesda Softworks

Well, this was a surprise. I wasn’t expecting much from my hands-on session withWolfenstein: The New Order. I was underwhelmed with the demo I saw at E3, and the quick time I spent with the first-person shooter didn’t give much hope. It was more of an exercise in frustration. Back in June, I was dropped in the middle of the game with little to no input on the gameplay. Suffice to say, I died a lot.

But this month, I got to play The New Order from the beginning. I played through the prologue on a PlayStation 4, and with everything in context, the shooter was better than I was expecting. It offers a hat tip to its PC predecessor with its hero B.J. Blazkowicz and the levels of difficulty going from Can I play, Daddy? to Uber, which needs to be unlocked. I chose Bring ‘em On!, the equivalent to normal.

To say that Skyrim is a huge world would be like calling the water wet or the sky blue. It’s not an opinion; it’s a statement of fact. Bethesda Softworks has a long reputation of creating enormous open-ended worlds and their latest title, Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, is no exception.

It’s a type of game that players can get lost in. I spent three hours with Skyrim at a preview event, and by the time, I came out of it, I felt as though I was in a time warp. Somehow I lost three hours of my life in a blink of an eye. All I remember was killing some bandits and undead creatures in one of the first major quests, and suddently, it was over.

The pre-alpha build I started on was about 45 minutes into the game. It’s about the equivalent of coming out of Vault 101 in Fallout 3. It’s also where you’re officially introduced to the world. All I had to do was name my character and pick its race and other details. I don’t know about you, but I agonized over this choice, even if the avatar would last for a few hours.

I scrolled through the 10 races, and they’re ones that fantasy fans are used to. Several different types of humans and elves, orcs, Argonian (the reptile race) and Khajit (cat people). Players can be either male or female. I chose an male orc named Babymaker (He was going to be a lady’s man.), who had the beserker ability that deals double damage while taking half damage for a limited time.

It’s been five years between Elder Scrolls games, but you can’t really harp on Bethesda Game Studios for the long gap. Between Oblivion and its upcoming title Skyrim, they were busy revitalizing some franchise called Fallout. The experience working on another property seems to have helped the developers, and Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is the better for it.

I got a look at the game running on Bethesda’s new Creation Engine at E3 last week. The team has been working on it for the past three years, and they’ve redone everything. The world is more detailed with plants casting shadows and blowing in the wind. There’s no longer any transition in activating conversations with characters. Children now inhabit the world. Everything is more beautiful and seamless. It’s breathtaking.

Mention Prey and two things pop in my head. The first is the weird doors that look like a woman’s private parts. I mean it’s fairly obvious. The second is the hero, Tommy, a Native American who was basically immortal and couldn’t die in the game. “Death” as the developers designed it was a minigame that Tommy would eventually win and he would return to his body from the Spirit World.

In the sequel, the original developer Human Head Studios moves in another direction and Prey 2 stars yet another protagonist who is abducted by aliens and ends up in a foreign world. Enter Killian Samuels, an air marshal on a plane that was ripped apart and crash landed.

If the scenario sounds familiar to Prey fans, well, it’s because the airliner I just mentioned, Flight 6401, is the one that in the Sphere during the middle of the original campaign. That means Prey 2 takes place in the same universe and it also means that players will eventually run into Tommy.